I followed my mother. She climbed into Suzy, locked the door, put her seat belt on, and curled tightly over the steering wheel. I tapped and tapped. She glared at me, but she opened the door. I climbed in.
“Mom,” I said.
“Yes, honey. Gosh, it’s been a long, long day! Has it been for you too?” She sounded clear and sweet and strange.
Slowly, slowly, I inched my hand across the bench seat. I wanted to get Ruby her purse back without hurting my mother’s feelings, without making her feel foolish.
“Mom,” I said. My hand was spidering inches from her thigh. “Mom. We’re just friends. We were just playing hearts. It’s not fun or anything.” I could feel the heat coming off her thigh. The engine was running. “Please be okay,” I said.
“Oh, Heather.” She turned to me, hard, flashing. “He hates me, he despises me, and so do you. I sit alone, night after night, all I can think of is your health and safety.”
My hand was back under my leg. My father was yelling louder.
She said, “I’m not this kind of a person. I am a person who respects. But I don’t even know you anymore. Or your father.” She was shaking. “I am pushed to my limit. I am on the brink.”
The purse seemed like a bomb. I couldn’t touch it. Carefully, I got out of the truck. My mother drove away, chugging slowly around the corner, hitting the curb. I watched her disappear. Somehow, it seemed like it was all my fault. I stood in the scrubby crabgrass yard and looked at the sky. Then I walked down to the lake. Maybe I would be kidnapped. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. We’d become friends. I’d write home.
I never found out how Ruby got her purse back. No mention was made of any of it.
That winter, Fred took me to dinner at Gary’s Duck Inn to celebrate some big news. We sat for a long time in the parking lot while he cried, tears and mucus and sobs, a huge old messy cry. “Just don’t leave me, punkin,” he said. “Please don’t leave your ol’ daddy. Stay with your daddy. Please, please, please.”
He threw his head onto my shoulder. “I don’t want you to grow up. That’s my problem. Don’t leave Orlando. Promise?”
I promised. I pulled closer to the door. I had one hand on the handle. “What’s the big announcement? What is going on? Do you have cancer again?” As I spoke, a group of sloppy-looking men in cheesy suits burst out of the swinging doors of the restaurant. “We don’t have to eat here,” I said. “We could just get subs or Rossi’s or something.”
“No, we’re going to have a nice dinner. It’s our last dinner together for a long time.” He wiped his nose and face and wiped his hands on his pants, but the moment he touched his pants, he was sobbing again. I stroked his thin shoulder. I felt so bad for him. I had a theory about his drinking, his sadness, his hollering, his bras and panty hose. I knew his father had beaten his mother to pieces. My uncle Donny had told me she’d been hospitalized for a broken collarbone more than once. My father had left home when he was fourteen, moved in with the manager of the movie theater where he sold popcorn, changed the reels. I had decided he wore feminine things not because he was gay but because he wanted to stay soft.
“Are you sick?” I said.
“No,” he said. He laughed through his tears. “Not the horse pistol.” He was in perfect health, he said. He hit the dashboard with his hands. He was going to live to be a hundred. “Let’s go eat,” he said.
I walked in before him and asked the hostess for a table for two.
“Get us a good table. A nice table,” he said, too loudly. She moved her grease pencil around in the hostess stand. Where can I stow this loud man? she must have been thinking. Where can I hide these terrifying people?
He lowered his hand by my leg and burned my pants with his cigarette. I brushed the ashes to the floor and went to the bathroom. I patted my pants with wet paper towels. There was a perfect round hole where my leg showed through. The skin looked fine, but every time the pants rubbed, cold air came in, and it burned. I held my hand over the hole, limping, and the hostess led me to our booth. My father had peeled back the little curtains that separated our booth from the next one, and he was talking to the family there, telling them about German wine, the Reezlings, the only thing worth drinking.
I tried to draw him back to our table. I buttered his roll. I jiggled his drink. What was the big news?
“Order.” He banged me on the head with the menu.
“Fish in the bag,” I said, refusing to open the menu or to pick it up from where it had fallen next to me.
“No,” he said. “Try something else.” He named the other dishes I should order. The red snapper. The sirloin. The surf and turf. He called out each one as though it had been invented moments earlier, was brand-new. The waitress tapped her pen on her black leatherette pad.
I told her fish en papillote, por favor.
No, no, no, no, he said. He argued. I ordered a glass of Chablis. He grabbed my hands and squeezed them, finally. “You don’t know how to have fun. That’s your problem.”
“Tell me,” I begged when the waitress left.
He slammed both hands down on the table. “The old man is going to Europe. I’m taking an opportunity to inspect Germany. For two months. How do you think that sounds, huh?”
“I have school,” I said. But I was thinking I could learn more in Germany. I wouldn’t have to be with Fred all the time. Then I could stay on, as an au pair, learn German, possibly go to school in France, study art. Ballet. I wished he’d told me sooner. But I would support it. I wanted to go. “It sounds good, Daddy,” I said.
“You’re not going,” he said. “Freddy’s going to Germany. Solo.” He made wing motions with his arm. He drained his cocktail. And added: Donny would be coming down in a couple weeks to take care of me. He smacked the table again, hard, with his flat hands. He had tears in his eyes. He motioned for the waitress.
I didn’t say anything. Fred was going to Germany. Who knew why or how that would work? Ruby wouldn’t marry Fred until he quit running around with other women; maybe she would let me live with her. Maybe she wouldn’t—the hurricane that was my mother made it hard for anyone to take me on. I knew it was a crazy thing to do, and I felt sorry for myself in advance. But I had to hope for my mother. I had to turn myself into the girl who could fit with her. Fred sat there, his mouth slung open, a wild, vacated look in his eye. His hands were coming across the table like liquid, aiming for my arms. I drew back. I knew I could do it. I could work my way back into her.
Four
Married, I moved back to Michigan in May, and I stretched myself between two homes and, in a larger sense, two lives. The boys were continually late for school. My roof leaked. My computer died. Dave had a cold and the dogs had hot spots and Jacob had a D- in English. Junior was called “Fish” at school, because he refused to take a shower. Every day the boys’ cell phones rang and I saw them carefully check the incoming calls in the greasy, tiny windows. “It’s her,” Jacob would say. “Mom again,” Junior would say. They would shake their heads and put the phones away and I wondered how they felt, how their skin felt, what they remembered of her. She called the boys hundreds of times a day. Dave had cautioned them not to give her their numbers. Their visits with her had to be supervised. Dave had shown me a photograph of her and warned me not to let her in my house if she came by. She wasn’t supposed to come near him. But would I recognize her if she did show up?
My own mother wasn’t speaking to me. If I called, she hung up. If I called right back, the line was busy; it would be busy for days. I quit calling. I’d never gone this long without talking to my mother. It was freeing and ungrounding at the same time. I was not myself.
Mother’s Day, I woke up at Dave’s apartment, Junior standing over the bed. “Okay, close your eyes, close your eyes, close your eyes.” He blindfolded me. I let him lead me down the hallway. Dave said, “Be gentle, be gentle with her, now.” He thanked me for going along with it. The boys had been conferencing all week.
“Okay, o
kay, okay,” said Junior. “Jacob, hit it!”
I opened my eyes and I was in the doorway to the living room. Pieces of purple tissue paper were taped over the doorway, a quilt of paper. Through the purple tissue paper, I could see Jacob standing by the light switch. Dave was in his running shorts with the camera, at the other doorway.
“Burst through!” Junior said. “Burst through to the side, you can go now, you can do it!” He gave me a shove. And I did burst—into tears.
New dishes—silver, gray, with blue flowers, the sweetest dishes and all of their cousins, every possible piece—covered the table. Every square inch. Saucers, cups, serving dishes, a hundred pieces of china.
Junior had saved up from his grocery store job and purchased the set. “Even the little gravy boat!” He rocked it, swam it over the table. “Don’t cry!” he said, and he shook me by the shoulders.
“Gentle, son, gentle there, big fella.” Dave pulled him back.
Jacob burst through the purple paper, over and over, until it was shreds.
We never used those dishes, or any dishes.
Evenings unfurled and Dave nibbled on chips and salsa, standing by the fridge. The boys were always MIA. I complained. They couldn’t just be mooching other people’s dinners every night. I wanted to cook for us. I worried. I kept telling Dave we needed to know where the boys were. I wanted him to help me do this. But Dave didn’t believe in ordering the boys around, imposing routine where it had never existed. We never ate dinner together. We never even sat down at the table. For weeks, the dishes stayed on display, the twelve settings mashed together, stacked on the table. And then at some point Dave boxed them up and put them away. I kept the gravy boat. I used it down at my house, for flowers.
We still spent evenings and weekends house-hunting. But our social life wasn’t social, it was just life. Dave didn’t have close friends or any hobbies or groups; he said his focus was us, me and the boys. I’d been in upstate New York for too long; I’d drifted from my Michigan friends. They didn’t approve of Dave anyway. I felt uncomfortable taking him to college events: his beliefs were so different from everyone else’s. He was gentle but opinionated, and his voice carried. “You just want to be a mother,” one friend said to me. “You don’t have anything in common with that man.” Quietly, I stopped speaking to her. When another friend found out he was in the NRA, she shrieked. What was I thinking? “Don’t you want to know people from a variety of backgrounds? Isn’t that what liberal is, by definition?” I said. I felt sick inside. “No,” she said. “Not really.” Dave always spoke highly of my friends. I didn’t tell him of their criticism, my susceptibility to it.
That summer, Dave and I drove around the county and walked through old schoolhouses, fixer-uppers on the back rivers, ranches by cemeteries and highways. We skipped vinyl-sided developments; we sought out the fringe. Could we live on a houseboat? Could we live in two trailers, out in the country? Could we afford a new house, three levels, each of us with a zone of our own? The process felt like us getting ready for life together.
We were so wide open to every possibility that we actually had no vision at all.
“Anything good?” Jacob would ask, paging through the blue notebook in which I had collected all the real estate flyers, annotated and hole-punched. I gave all the houses nicknames. Peachy. Scruffy I. Scruffy II. The Bird Nest. Summer peaked. The Fourth of July passed. One night Junior slapped the notebook shut and tossed it across the living room floor. He was in his grocery store shirt, a black polo; his little name tag read David D. He said, “You guys aren’t ever going to buy a house.” He said it plainly, confidently, stating a fact. He sighed, hoisted himself up, and went out the door. I didn’t see him the rest of that week. He was spending time with friends, Dave said.
I thought he should spend more time with us. I thought there should be a curfew, I thought there should be rules. I thought, now that we were married, that what I thought should count.
“They’re fine,” Dave said. “I’m not going to be a police. You’re the one with the busy schedule. Not us.”
Many nights that summer I slept at my own house. One morning I woke up alone, made tea, and let out the dogs. Out back, a utility guy in a tan Carhartt jumpsuit was examining my roof, holding a long pincer on a stick.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” he said. He said it like a radio announcer, like he said it every day. Like it was fun for him to say.
I jumped back into my house and slammed the door. I had the phone in my hands, ready to call 911.
“It’s just me,” he called to the back door. “It’s me, sweetheart.”
“What are you doing?” I yelled.
“I’m just looking at that branch up there. On your roof. Potentially causing a problem.” He was talking really slow, as though to a wild animal or a dementia patient. As though I were on a ledge, about to drop.
No matter that I knew it was Dave, it didn’t look like Dave. I felt irritated at Dave, and tricked by Dave, and frustrated because this—this not recognizing him—wasn’t his fault at all.
I turned my back on him. I went back up to the kitchen and got my tea and walked out the front door and over to the park and sat under the giant tulip tree. I was being a bitch. Ever since I’d gotten married, I’d been in a bad mood.
August. Dave was in his bedroom, ironing his shirts, watching Rambo.
The dinner hour had passed; no one had eaten. Again I was on the bottom bunk bed between the boys. “Show me again,” I said to Jacob. He needed to shower tonight. He was so dirty and so cute. He was like a giant Newfoundland puppy or a character from The Lord of the Rings with his long blond hair and giant, pawlike hands and feet.
“Press A.” Junior reached for the controller. He was mad we hadn’t found a house yet. I was playing Nintendo to cheer him up. I had to plan my syllabi for the upcoming semester and turn them in. But Nintendo was so much more fun.
“She has to learn,” Jacob said gently, and he took the controller from Junior and pressed it back into my palms. I was surprised to see Jake was a natural teacher. Softly he said, “You wake up. You’re on a beach. What would you do in real life?”
I stared at the screen. There was my guy, a little blur of blue light, a red shirt, and my yellow head. Standing on a beach. The ocean, an abyss. What would I do in real life? I looked at Jacob. “What would I do? I would worry.”
“You would start walking. So walk.”
“Press A,” Junior said. “You always press A. A. A. A. A.” He reached over, pressed the button.
The beach was beige and endless.
“You notice a cave,” Jacob said. “You’re going to want to go in it.”
I didn’t notice a cave until Jacob said so. I didn’t want to go in it. I was claustrophobic. Plus, I was walking down the beach, without a care in the world. When I saw the cave, I thought: Keep walking, no sudden moves. I thought: Cave man. I thought: Run, flee, swim, die.
“Oh God,” Junior said. “I can’t watch.” He extracted himself from the bed and loped away.
Jacob pressed my thumb down with his giant index finger. My guy appeared in the mouth of the cave. Jacob said, “You go in the cave. You see a shield. What does that make you want to do?”
“Worry whose it is.”
“Press A,” Junior yelled from the living room. “Always. It’s going to be press A. Press A!”
“Unnecessary yelling!” Dave yelled from his bedroom.
I held the controller and stared at my guy in the cave.
“Press A,” Jacob said. “On the shield. You can do it.” He grinned. He took the controller. Now my guy was on the shield. They were one with each other.
“You know that you want the shield and your task is to go find the sword.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
Jacob explained: “You always need weapons. If you don’t have weapons, that is going to be the first thing you need always, okay?”
I picked up the shield.
“I’d run now,” Jacob said. “Go, go, go. Leave.”
“Am I in danger?”
“No,” Jacob said. He rubbed his eyes with his fists. “It’s just that this part is boring. It gets so much better.”
“Mostly, you’ll run into non-playable characters,” Junior said, leaning in.
“Like life,” I said.
“The rest of the game is going to be finding people and talking to them,” Jacob said. “People are going to tell you things. They’re going to make finding the mission more complicated.”
“The little dude is right,” Junior said. “I hate to say it. You know I do. But he is.”
And so I went where I hadn’t been before, with only a vague idea of what I was supposed to find.
Meanwhile, that summer the librarian at my university introduced me to PsycLIT, a search engine for specialized articles and papers on a sweeping range of medical conditions. I searched with the key words recognition, schizophrenia, faces, emotion, offspring, right left confusion, face, memory. I found dozens of articles, but nothing I read suggested that a schizophrenic parent would produce a child unable to recognize people by face. When I figured out how to access PsycLIT from my office on campus, I drove down to school late at night, working in the dark at my little desk in 308 Lubbers Hall. I typed in vision, children, schizophrenic mothers, children of schizophrenics, offspring of schizophrenics, and I searched faces, families, mentally ill. Writing the searches was like writing poetry: Which combination of words would be magical? Which words would open the door? What door would it be? I kept playing with the words, trying to find the article I needed, the one that would say, Yes, children of schizophrenics had this sliver of the illness, it manifested in this terrible face confusion.
One night I was skimming along, and there it was: face recognition; also prosopagnosia. I knew, intuitively, this was what I was looking for.
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